Is time on our side?

"Unlike the Rolling Stones song 'Time is on my side', these days time really is not. Not even close."

When I was in my thirties, I was always in a rush. Like many that age, I had a lot of irons in the fire. My career, my Navy Reserve job, a young family, a newly built house, and a huge yard. I never had enough time. One of my expressions I would use back then was "time is not my friend". And usually, it was not.

When I got into my forties, I started to make a turn in my life. I tried to get some balance. Some perspective. I needed it, as I could really be a jerk in my thirties. That new perspective continued on into my fifties and then to retirement.

I bring this up for a reason - I am starting to think of time once again the same way I thought of it in my thirties. In other words, time is not my friend. And actually from the standpoint of our country, time is not the friend of any of us. Time is really not on our side right now.

Even thought our President is trying to take a victory lap for all he has done (or done too us) in the past seven years, many things are left undone or are just plain getting worse. For example, many people much smarter than I have written books or articles about the tenuous nature of our electrical grid. Most of us know it is held together with spit and gum. And yet, nothing happens. No improvement, not even plans for improvement. We are living on borrowed time. If our grid goes down, people die. And that could be many thousands or millions of them.

The economy continues to get worse, the War on Terror is going nowhere, and the government grows out of control. More people are poor, many government schools are a mess, and the need to food stamps continues to grow. ObamaCare and MNSure are abject failures. And what is being done? Not much. And I am growing more and more impatient. To fix the problems which need to be fixed, we need leadership who will not just "tinker around the edges". We need true leadership who will dive in with sleeves rolled up. And each day, every day, we wait. And the clock continues to tick. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.

It has been said we get the government we deserve. True. We also get the leaders we deserve. Seven years ago we elected a guy with a paper thin resume who did not have a clue on how to do the job. And he messed it up. To punish him for his failure, we re-elected him. Go figure. 

This November, we will once again have the chance to elect people who can make a difference. Who can move the ball down the field? Who can truly get this nation back on track? We don't have time for another mistake. The clock is ticking. We are running out of time. And I am afraid that time is no longer on our side.